Questions and Comments

Alberta Climate Information Service (ACIS)

Bringing you up-to-date Alberta weather and climate data

Welcome to ACIS, an interactive tool that helps producers, farm consultants, and researchers to see Alberta weather forecasts, browse over 10000 maps of Alberta weather and Alberta climate
related information, and access near real time station data from over 350 meteorological stations operating in the province of Alberta.
The maps and weather data describe Alberta's weather, climate and related agriculture features to help with your long-term planning and decision-making throughout the growing season.

Obtain up-to-date current weather conditions measured by the weather station of your choice.
Interact with dynamic graphs that resize to the time period that you select.
Additionally, view at-a-glance weather derivatives for the current growing season to make more informed operational decisions.

Find out where the meteorological stations are in Alberta and download, graph and compare near-real-time data from more than 350 stations.
Both hourly and daily data is available with the hourly data usually only about 2 hours old and daily data current as of yesterday.
The data has been quality controlled and missing or erroneous data values have been filled and flagged.
Data flags that are included with the downloaded data indicate if the data is actual, computed or missing.

As of February 2013, there were over 12,000 maps in the archive. Many of these maps date as far back as 1961.
Each week about 40 new maps are added to the viewer, describing current conditions and trends.
Explore Alberta's current and historical climate trends and extremes.
Currently map categories include precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, snowpack, drought indices and others.
AF is committed to adding new categories all the time.
Give us some feedback and if we can benefit a wide enough audience, you may see a brand new set of maps.

View a map of current weather conditions near any location or across the province.
See values for a variety of weather elements plotted on an interactive map interface.
You can also go through historical records and see how the weather conditions were spatially distributed in the past.

View current weather radar imagery on an easy-to-use, interactive map interface.
You can zoom the radar map right to any location to see if it received precipitation in the last few hours or if a storm system is headed in its direction.
You can also view the entire province at a glance to get the big picture.
The radar viewer also lets you display the most recent radar image, automatically fetching new data as it becomes available.

View a week-long forecast for several locations as issued by the Environment Canada Weather Office.

Browser Requirements

Recent versions of Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer were used to test this system.
Our tests showed that on some systems not all browsers performed the same.
If you find performance to be slow, particularly when using the applications that rely upon Google maps, try a different browser.
If you are having issues viewing and using our site, please do a full browser refresh (usually Ctrl-F5).
If you are still having problems, do not hesitate to contact us.

Performance and Expected Wait Times

When viewing the ACIS maps, users can expect display times similar to that of any other images viewed on the web.
Smaller images are about 70kb and the higher quality images are about 200kb.

When viewing Station Data and Graphs, the underlying database queries can take up to 30 seconds or so to return information, independent of your internet connection speed.
This will depend on how much data you are trying to retrieve and how many people are accessing data at the same time.